Dan Kogai wrote:
> On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 04:02 , Doug Ewell wrote:
> >> John Cowan:
> >>> Traditional and Simplified characters are *not* unified
> in Unicode,
> >>
> >> Some characters, e.g. '一' (one), are used in *both* Traditional and
> >> Simplified Chinese. The characters that are used in *both* systems
> >> are indeed unified.
> >
> > Then there is no problem deciding which glyph to use, right?
>
> Wrong. Try "People", For example.
>
> Japanese:
> http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/cgi-
> bin/kanjibukuro.cgi/char/JIS-2916/UCS-8846/KYOIKU
> Simplified Chinese (PRC):
> http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/cgi-
> bin/kanjibukuro.cgi/char/GB-5458/GBK-D6DA/UCS-4F17/JOYO
> Traditional Chinese (ROC):
> http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/cgi-
> bin/kanjibukuro.cgi/char/CNS1-5C38/BIG5-B2B3/UCS-773E/JOYO
<ByTheWay>
These links don't work for me (even after re-joining the spit lines).
However, the code of the three Unicode characters appears in the URL, so I
looked them up for the convenience of those who can read UTF-8:
- U+8846 (衆): Japanese
- U+4F17 (众): simplified Chinese
- U+773E (眾): traditional Chinese
</ByTheWay>
I don't follow your point. These are three *separate* Unicode characters, so
I don't see how there can be any glyph issue.
Han Unification is said to cause a glyph issue when the *same* Unicode
character has different shapes in Chinese and Japanese. In this case, if the
character is displayed with a Chinese font, it would have an inappropriate
shape for Japanese readers.
<ByTheWay>
But I fail to see why this should be an issue. The solution seems very
simple: Japanese computers should use Japanese fonts!
It is not surprising that Japanese looks weird if typeset with a font
designed for Chinese. Also Italian looks weird if typeset with a Chinese
font: the accented letters à è é ì ò ù look horrible in "pinyin style"
(particularly à and ò, which are hardly distinguishable and, thus, may cause
confusions between the 1st and 3rd person of the future tense). Moreover,
the apostrophe has to much white space on the right side, so that
"l'apostrofo" looks like "l' apostrofo" (which is a spelling error). But,
again, the simple solution is not using Chinese fonts to typeset Italian.
</ByTheWay>
> As you see, Simplified Chinese is not just "Simplified"
> but a complete reinvention of the whole character.
That is often the case. And that's a big nuisance for all people trying to
learn Chinese. But I don't see how it is an issue for Unicode or for
Japanese users (OK, apart those studying Chinese, of course).
As already said, Unicode does *not* unify "simplified" and "traditional"
characters. So, it will never happen that you get a beef noodle on your face
by changing the font of a document.
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Mar 21 2002 - 07:52:12 EST